The Big Bang

It all starts here....

First up, I would like to say a simple hello to all of you. In order to get this newsletter/substack/vibe corner off the ground I’ve had to mine the depths of my email & phone for contacts, old & new.

That means some of you I’ll have seen recently, some of you I’ll have seen a while ago & others I won’t have seen in an age. I’m sorry, but I know, you know, how it is. And for everyone else reading this, a first time viewer &, hopefully, subscriber: Welcome!

Let me say from the get-go that what I’m hoping to do with Pages, Beats & Boots is very simple: spread a little joy & exuberance in the world. Oh, & get paid. Maybe. One day.

The truth is I have so much to share, so many words - I always have had - & so many experiences. I’ve been so lucky. So in this, the inaugral post/newsletter, I thought I’d bring you up to speed with where I’m at & offer a little taster of what I’ve got lined up, so you can judge for yourself whether PB&B is something you want in your life.

But let me roll back the clock a ‘lil bit on all of this.

To a youth spent first in Cheltenham, then a mixture of South Korea, Paris, Brighton at the University of Sussex & eventually, London (all over London) via a year travelling the globe.

Yep, that’s me in the back, on the right, at Junior Prom in Daegu, South Korea, 1998, with some friends looking like a bunch of boy band rejects. (Nothing quite says 1990s like Sun-In spruced curtains).

On my return from globe-trotting, several months temping in the City convinced me how utterly unsuited to corporate life I was, so I fled back to Brighton to do an NCTJ. Meanwhile, a Sliding Doors night out with a mate whose girlfriend had been working the Five Live phones & offered to put my C.V forward became the launchpad for a long career in sports journalism - initially at the BBC, as a Broadcast Assistant, Meet&Greeter, Broadcast Journalist & Producer (I even cropped up on the radio once on a segment about dating) working across iconic shows, from the Sony-award winning Sportsweek, to BBC Five Live Breakfast, the Mayo Show & even studio producing Test Match Special.

I met so many incredible people during this period at the Beeb & beyond - from David Beckham to Edwin Moses, John Barnes, Didier Drogba & Helen Mirren to… Gary Neville?

I also answered an ad by two seriously talented graphic designers, Adam Towle & James Roper, who were looking for football writers to contribute to a new magazine, The Green Soccer Journal. They loved an article I sent them & we hit it off straight away. They shared my fatigue with football content in general & wanted something at the intersection of fashion, football & culture.

That magazine was the Green. I started working for them & before long was editing the whole thing & generating cover concepts. It lasted five amazing years & I can’t wait to take you inside a rare & beautiful publication.

In 2011 I was part of the Salford exodus at the BBC & went on to spend 12 years at Stats Perform as Producer, Senior Editor of the UK digital content & Editorial (Opta) teams &, latterly, as a Senior Field Journalist.

At SP I was priveleged to do so many incredible things. From taking a trip to Antigua to interview Viv Richards on Carlysle Bay beach, to travelling up to Gleneagles for the Ryder Cup in 2015, falling in love with St. Andrews at the 150th Open, to seeing the heady lights of Qatar during the recent World Cup & interviewing the likes of Usain Bolt in London.

In 2023 I was made redundant. So I launched myself into the manuscript of a science fiction novel I’d steadily been working on in the background for years. I actually finished it, without compass & without instruction (in the industry they call this pantsing); working my arse off, partly fuelled by fear & the unknown, & by hope, too.

Yet when I started investigating what was required (I know - it might have been a good idea to do this part first), I realised that, at a whopping 220,000 words, it was a bloated mess (around 100k is industry standard for a debut) so I resolved to try & edit it as a means of improving my craft &, in the meantime, around November last year, I had the idea for another.

So I took everything I had learned (I aim to share it all) & wrote this new story - this time, with a bit of planning, it came out a respectable 123,000 words. A first draft made it through the early rounds of the Cheshire Novel Prize & I took their superb, detailed feedback to fashion subsequent iterations. In the autumn I sent the latest draft to a friend to beta-read ahead of an attempt to hawk it to agents in the querying trenches at some future point.

After that I felt… well, lost.

Because selling a book is a pipe-dream & I need to make a living. I’m still freelancing with the camera, but at the moment it’s a side hustle & I realised I needed something else, some other goal worthy of striving towards, for, as Victor Frankl says:

Thus it can be seen that mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become… What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.

So this is my task; PB&B is my goal.

Now I don’t know what type of content you normally consume. I don’t know whether you like Long Reads in the Guardian, glamour, scurrility & schaudenfraude in the Daily Mail, eye candy or cat porn on Insta, Russian bots & megolomaniac populists on Twitter, handing the Chinese government your vitals via dopaminergic shorts on Tik Tok. Facebook? I hear they’re great for Trumpistan data breaches & election microtargeting. Gambling? Fantasy Football? Whatever your bag, as the granddaddy of behavioural psychology, Roberto Cialdini says:

With the sophisticated mental apparatus we have used to build world eminence as a species, we have created an environment so complex, fast-paced, and information laden that we must increasingly deal with it in the fashion of the animals we long ago transcended.

And relying on instinct makes us vulnerable. In fact, most of the content I consume online makes me feel like I’ve just binged at a drive-through. I want something cleaner, healthier… more uplifting… nah, scratch that: more meaningful.

So, I’ve decided to create it myself.

I want to take you Behind-The-Scenes of all my greatest trips, I want to give you an insight into how Sportsweek was put together. I want to show you what it’s like in the media lounge at a Premier League ground (who offers the best food?), I want to tell you what it’s like trying to fight your way into a Mixed Zone when Tiger’s in town.

I want to share my passion for Fiction & non-Fiction, for Film & TV. For music, all music, but mostly Hip Hop, Soul, Funk & Disco. For learning, & for sport, especially football.

I love football.

I’ve Deep Dives lined up on Iam Hamilton’s book concerning fandom & Paul Gascoigne, Gazza Agonistes, first published in the Green & updated for the social media generation, on why Garrincha is more revered by Brazilians than Pelé, on the glorious cultural gumbo which fuels the Premier League.

I’ve got Top 25 G.O.A.T villains & heroes pieces lined up. Top 25 G.O.A.T Emcees.

I want to tell you why Cormac McCarthy is the king of literature, why everyone should be reading books by Robert Greene on power & seduction, why Cee-lo Green is an incredible songwriter, why Devante Swing is one of the best producers to ever do it, why DJ Quik might have a better back catalogue than Dr. Dre, why Lagos was such fertile terrain for the superstars of Boogie, Pop & Disco in the 1980s.

I’ve got treasure troves of quotes gleaned from books over the years, essays on Attention, on Free Will & one tentatively titled: Is Sobriety Bad For You? (I heard that chuckle - you’ll just have to wait & hear me out) & an essay called Everything Is Everything that seeks to explain what we really are.

Are you ready?

I confess: this post was originally conceived as a mere fluttering of the eyelids, an artful strip-tease if you will, but something about it feels Full Monty. Maybe that’s the way this should feel, maybe that’s the way this should always feel.

So get ready for essays, excerpts & visuals. & ampersands. I love an ampersand.

Once a week, sent every Friday, a single bit of content - & if I can’t brighten your life just a little bit, if I can’t entertain you, make you feel good, give you something to think about, something to share, then all you need to do is unsubscribe & I’m in the wind.

But.

Now that we’ve started this journey together, don’t you think it would be nice if we could make it the rest of the way?

Much love!

Will